Accelerate your career with the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge → Learn More

Revolutionizing Data Management with Fabric, Dataverse and AI

Revolutionizing Data Management with Fabric, Dataverse and AI

Revolutionizing Data Management
Scott Sewell

Send me a Text Message here

FULL SHOW NOTES
https://podcast.nz365guy.com/575

Unlock the power of data transformation in our latest episode as we chat with Scott Sewell, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, who shares his journey from the bustling streets of Manhattan to the serene landscapes of Tennessee. Scott's evolution from a Dynamics CRM expert to a Power BI advocate provides a fascinating backdrop for our discussion on the significance of turning transactional data into impactful reports. Discover how these insights can engage decision-makers and highlight the real value within Dataverse.

We delve into the transformative potential of Microsoft Fabric, a unified platform that streamlines data management by integrating SQL servers, data warehouses, and analytics tools. By reducing complexity, Fabric allows businesses to concentrate on configuring tools to meet specific needs. We also cover the current lifecycle of Fabric, from its preview phase to general availability, and provide an overview of its user-centric licensing model. Scott's insights draw a parallel between the evolution of Fabric and the impactful changes seen in the Power Platform, reinforcing the importance of innovative data solutions.

Finally, we explore the interplay between AI, Fabric, and Dataverse. Scott sheds light on how structured data sources are essential for efficient AI model training, making it easier for businesses to create intelligent models that can predict outcomes and identify patterns. We also touch on the democratization of AI tools, ensuring advanced technologies are accessible to more users. To wrap up, we share our anticipation for the upcoming Power Platform Conference in Vegas, where networking opportunities abound and the latest advancements in data management will be unveiled. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge that promises to enhance your business processes and decision-making.

OTHER RESOURCES
Author of The CRM Field Guide: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B009ITN8M6/about?ingress=0&visitId=79d0a409-1a38-425f-980c-fcc47ec2858a 
Power Community: https://events.powercommunity.com/speaker/scott_sewell/
CRMrocks: https://crmrocks.com/2023/01/14/power-bi-and-dataverse-with-scott-sewell/
GitHub: https://github.com/mscottsewell     

90 Day Mentoring Challenge  10% off code use MBAP at checkout https://ako.nz365guy.com

Support the Show.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.

Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith

Chapters

00:01 - Microsoft Fabric and Dataverse Integration

10:09 - Microsoft Fabric

15:38 - Microsoft Fabric Vision and Licensing

29:02 - Leveraging AI With Fabric and Dataverse

35:26 - Networking at Vegas Conference

Transcript

Mark Smith: Welcome to the Co-Pilot Show, where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on Fabric, microsoft Fabric and Dataverse, how they work together and why you should be considering this part of your strategy. Today's guest is from Henderson, tennessee in the United States. He works at Microsoft as a principal program manager. He's worked with the Power Platform. He has a history in Dynamics CRM from way back in the day, but a big advocate of Power BI in more recent times, as well as Fabric and what is that Fabric Dataverse story? He's contributed to multiple books over his career. He's been a long-term community advocate for many, many years. He was an MVP in this category before I became an MVP, but of course, he's now a Blue Badge. Links to his bio, social media, et cetera will be in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Scott Sewell: Mark, Good to see you again. We've been in this game for a long, long time, haven't?

Mark Smith: we yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean a long time right.

Scott Sewell: A friend of mine posted a question about certifications. I pulled my certification up. March was 20 years since I became certified, but I was working in Power Platform, our CRM, for a year or so before I became certified.

Mark Smith: Yeah, my OG cert was an NT4 certification, or it might have been an NT2000. I don't know, I can't remember. It's a long time ago, a long time ago.

Scott Sewell: There were some interesting days, those first implementations.

Mark Smith: Totally, totally. Now, back in the day you used to live in New York. From memory, you've gone build a home. Tell us a bit about life. What are you up to these days?

Scott Sewell: You know, I was on a CRM project in New York, so it's the last six weeks, then it turned into three months, then six months and two years and in the process I met my wife there and that turned into 12, maybe 13 years that I lived in the city. Wow, we were right there in Manhattan and it was great, we enjoyed it, had a blast living there. But at some point we decided that we wanted to move back closer to family and chose to build a home. I actually live across the street from my parents now, so it's been good and with Microsoft being, you know, with Teams and the availability of remote work, now it's been seamless effectively to get back here and to be able to enjoy that so good.

Mark Smith: Tell us about your role now. What are you up to? What's your focus at Microsoft?

Scott Sewell: Yeah, so I joined Microsoft six years ago Well, six and a half years ago now and I joined on the sales side for Dynamics. I was a GBB Global Black Belt for the customer service side. So I was a GBB Global Black Belt for the customer service side and then, about two years after I started, transitioned over to the Power App, the Power BI team. I've been with that team since then, so it's been a while since I've been there. But my focus area originally was, like I said when I joined, was on Dynamics. Originally was, like I said when I joined, was on dynamics, and all through that time I kept finding that I was enamored with how great dynamics and how flexible and how much power that you got when you built in a dynamic solution. But I also found that a lot of the work that we did was very transaction oriented. It was creating a work order, creating a case, creating an opportunity or resolving that opportunity Very transaction driven. But all those transactions created a history and a data set that had a lot of value in it. And when I presented the dynamic solution to customers, I had two different audiences typically in the room. One audience was the people who were going to be using the application. They wanted to know is it easy to use, is it efficient? Can we configure it easily? Yes, yes, yes, we can do all that. But I had a second audience that was not always as obvious as the first audience. The second audience were the people who were actually signing the purchase agreements and they were typically not expecting to be day-to-day users of the application. They were typically ones who wanted to implement the application so that they had a better handle on this process that they were trying to implement for, whether it be the sales process or service process or field service, whatever that process was, they wanted to be able to say yes, we are delivering the type of service that we need to deliver to meet our customers' goals and our own goals internally. So they focused on that, but they really weren't seeing themselves as being somebody who would be going in and creating a service case or updating a ticket, and so I started. You know, you find these little secret weapons, you find these tricks, you go.

Scott Sewell: I found that if I actually turned a lot of the data that was built into Dynamics or being accumulated in Dynamics, turned it into a report in Power BI specifically, that I helped engage that second audience so that they could see the value of what was being generated and created and managed and processed and transacted inside of Dataverse. And when they could see the value of the information that was being gathered, they became an advocate for the process as well. So it was really, you know, my effort was around that, hitting it from both sides to say here's what the primary users are going to be seeing, as well as here's how all that transactional exhaust I don't know what to call it it's the history of the transactions that took place. Exhaust I don't know what to call it it's the history of the transactions that took place, how much more value there is sitting inside a dataverse that could be taken advantage of. And so that's where I focused on that.

Scott Sewell: Gradually I get picked up and moved over to the Power BI team.

Scott Sewell: But I came over to the Power BI team entirely focused on how to help power platform, how to help power platform organizations, partners, users, customers, how to help that audience really take advantage of Power BI. And so that's been my focus since then. But as we gradually, as Power BI has evolved and now has effectively exploded into Fabric, that's continued to be my focus area. I'm the Fabric to Dataverse representative from the Fabric side of things. I've got counterparts on the Dataverse team that I work with that are actually building parts of the integration, but I'm really trying to help that, communicate the story of what's available and let people know how to take advantage of it. Anyway, that's a long story short, but it's been a fun thing because you and I both go back so far with understanding how much value and excitement there can be around this power platform and sometimes I get pretty excited about it and it's genuine enthusiasm because I've seen it firsthand as to how incredible this tool set is and how valuable it can be if people take advantage of it.

Mark Smith: I love it and you know I've been on the Ecosystem podcast. We've been talking a lot about the need for BizApps folks to start looking at Fabric seriously because you know, I think Brad Smith said in one of his books back in 2019 that data is the gold, is the stuff that makes everything work, and the more data that organizations and I don't know you remember six, seven years've never been able to interpret the data to the degree that they potentially could or mine it for the potential value within it. And, of course, power BI has had a massive trajectory in the world of becoming the most dominant platform. And now we have Fabric. And before we unpack the Fabric to Dataverse relationship, how do you explain Fabric? And as a tool set from Microsoft, when you're talking to folks out in the market, how do you explain Fabric and the value it brings to an organization?

Scott Sewell: There's a lot of different ways you can approach that question and I don't know that I have the perfect answer. I don't have a canned answer for you, but I think there's a pretty good analogy to the Power Platform in that the Power Platform you think about Power Platform it's an umbrella of a lot of related tools that do different things. You've got your Power Automate, you've got your Power Pages and you just run down the list and there's a lot of different tools that are available to a user who are building things using the Power Platform. But it's kind of a. You know it's an overall thing, but it's also a managed tool. So when you go out and set up Power Platform, you're doing some Power Platform work. You don't have to go out and install an NT server, like we did back in the day. You don't have to set up a SQL server back, like we did. You don't have to worry about setting up some sort of authentication process. All that's part of this platform. It's just you have different tools within it you can build on.

Scott Sewell: Okay, so that side of it Think of the data side of things and rollback prefabric. You had SQL server, you had data warehouses, you had analytics tools, you had reporting tools. You had integration tools like Data Fabric, like you know, data Factory. You had all these tools that are out there that, if you wanted to use them and that was really what you needed in order to really take advantage of that big data like you mentioned from Brad like you mentioned from Brad you had to have people who would spin up these different tools and get them running, and they were built as somewhat like silos because they came from different sources and they came together. They all sat inside of Azure nominally, but you had to wind up wiring things together and hooking up things and some things behaved differently than others. I mean, they weren't consistent as a platform across them. There wasn't like a common administration form. That's just the reality of what was going on. It's a lot of tools that are going on in there. Fabric then steps in and becomes that platform that says, okay, bring all those into Fabric and Fabric's going to run as a service and it's a service. So there's a lot of commonality across all the tools, a lot of the features there. We understand them to be integrated by default and everything should assume to work together.

Scott Sewell: Now, within each of them, you've got a lot of tools that you then configure to solve a particular business purpose, just like you would go over to the Power Platform and you would set up a Power Automate to solve a particular thing, or then you set up a Power App to set up something. Over here you might set up your configuring warehouse or a data lake or using a data factory type thing with pipelines. But the reality is in the old days, back in the dark ages, like when we all got started, when you went out on project and you wanted to set up CRM 1.2, 3.0, you would have to install an application server, you would have to install a database. You typically install SQL or get access to their SQL environment so they can set up exchange connectors and all these different pieces, parts. You would spend a lot of time in your project just getting the plumbing done, and it was generic plumbing. It wasn't configured to that user's specific use case or anything. You're just putting in the tools that you could then build your application on top of. You could then configure it for what the user needed.

Scott Sewell: Same thing is true on the fabric side. You could spend a lot of time before configuring all these tools and getting them set up and only then could you step up into I'm configuring it what the user actually this particular customer needs. So, as Power Platform, a lot of that went down below the surface and became a platform and a software as a service. The same thing is true on the data side. All these tools that we used to set up individually and wire together, all that becomes part of this fabric platform, this fabric data platform. And now you step in, you turn it on and say, okay, I need a capacity and here's the tools I want to pick out and configure for my use case. So I think there's a pretty decent analogy in those two, in that they both have reduced the effort to get them set up and running and allow you to just focus on the use case, just like you'd focus on the use case for a power platform.

Scott Sewell: The same thing is true on the data side.

Scott Sewell: You focus on the use case, for what do I want to know about my data? What do I want to do with my data once I get it? And it really is. I think it's transformative in the sense that it used to be a huge hurdle to get into these big data tools, the big data scenarios. There's a lot of complexity there. I mean, it's not that the complexity goes away, but a lot of the complexity now has become part of just the management layer, just as part of the plumbing that's there by default and really now you focus on okay, what elements do I want to use or what tools do I want to use and what do I want to try to accomplish with the data that I have?

Scott Sewell: So that's, I think, the fabric in a nutshell, is that data platform that allows you to accomplish those things without focusing too much on the plumbing that sits down beneath the case, that infrastructure. That's all part of the service. Now I like it. The thing is great, so empowering and I think that's why we get so much attention now from the Power Platform community is because this community has gone through that transformation of being able to say here are a set of tools, we don't have to worry about the plumbing of the tools, we'll just configure them for our use case. Now they're starting to see Fabric as that same idea. It's a set of tools. We don't have to worry about the plumbing of the tools, we'll just configure them for our use case. Now they're starting to see Fabric as that same idea. It's a bunch of tools that are set up in the service and I can just configure them to what my use case is. It's an exciting time to be in this space.

Mark Smith: I totally agree. Tell me about where we are in the lifecycle from Microsoft's perspective of Fabric, talking about things like what's in preview, what's GA'd, and so I just want to just touch on that and also touch on the licensing model for Fabric and I don't want to go detailed, I just want a high level. This is a licensing model. On my tenant I get a monthly email saying I have Fabric and you know it's costing me zero at the moment. But tell me about. You know what that looks like.

Scott Sewell: So lifecycle where we are in the lifecycle, we'll talk about that first. Fabric went GA a year ago not even a year ago November last year and the dynamics integration piece of it went GA with it. So we were there day one. Every week we get new aspects or new releases of Fabric. There are parts of Fabric that have been GA since day one, including the Dataverse connector. There are parts that are being added even as we go. It is a rapidly growing tool and rapidly growing and expanding platform. There are pieces parts that have come over from Azure. A lot of the code base was brought in, so it's built on very mature and longstanding technology. There are parts that are being added to it even now, like the real-time intelligence, that are taking existing parts but adding new features to them that are still evolving and growing.

Scott Sewell: So I don't know that you'll ever see Fabric as being okay. We had a release of Fabric last year. We're waiting on the next year's Fabric release. I think it's going to be a continually evolving or continually growing tool. A lot of it's driven by customer use and customer requirements and saying hey, here's a customer that's been using this conglomeration of a bunch of vendor tools that have built this crazy mousetrap of all these tools that are there and this one has to be updated over here and they really want to simplify it and make it so they can just focus on the use cases. And they're moving over fabric. They say but we need this one thing here and that's the kind of things that will drive fabric expansion in that process.

Mark Smith: So what was the second question? Licensing Just as a high level. We don't need the SA, just a high level, high level, high level.

Scott Sewell: Sure. So fabric is interesting in that you basically sign up for what we call a capacity and the capacity is it's like a bucket and you say I want to use some fabric and here's how much fabric I think I want to use, and you take a guess at it and then everything within fabric uses more or less of those resources. In Fabric Like storage is really really cheap inside of Fabric and you can use a bunch of storage and it doesn't use up much of your capacity. But maybe you're running some kind of really intense spark job. It's hammering some CPUs or GPUs and that's going to burn up capacity faster.

Scott Sewell: But it is built on like we call them SKUs F-SKU, f2, f4, f8, 16, and they go up exponentially like that and they keep moving up. And as you move up those SKUs into larger and larger capacities, you get more memory allocated to you, more storage allocated to you and, most importantly, compute capacity added to you. And so occasionally you have customers who find it and say, look, we're barely touching what we had, let's move it down a notch. Or they say, hey, we're finding some incredible value over here. We want to bump it up a notch, and that's perfectly fine. You bump them up or down and say here's how much SKU that I want to, or where's the capacity that I want to allocate for ourselves. Nice, most of them, like the under 64 ones, all the ones that are below 64 are fairly straightforward and simple.

Scott Sewell: Once you hit 64, you get this added bonus of Power BI enablement for the entire organization. So the smaller ones if you have one of the F2 or 4, 8, 16, if you have that, it includes you know you can use all the tools there. But if anyone wants to review a report that's sitting in it, they need to have a Power BI license, a pro license of that. Once you hit 64, which is kind of the threshold once you hit 64, everybody in the organization immediately gets access of a free license to view reports and so across the organization they can view them all they want.

Scott Sewell: If you're going to edit them, publish them, you still need a pro license, but to be able to consume them all day long. You're golden with that level and above that's it. At a simplicity it's really. You figure up how much you're going to spend and sort of set that or you can just set it. If you really don't know, you can set it as a pay-as-you-go approach. It's going to be a little more expensive that way, but it has. You know, it jumps up and down based on exactly what you use.

Mark Smith: What was Microsoft's vision with Fabric? Because we know that we've had a whole bunch of the like you were saying. This is built on very mature technology. It's not like a V1. This is, you know, built on things like Synapse. This is built on, you know, the various databases, the compute, this, all that elasticity, et cetera, that you get with Azure. What was the thinking around Fabric? Much more holistically, what was Microsoft's, you know, thinking in that space?

Mark Smith: Because sometimes when I think of Fabric, I think of, well, when I think of data, right, I think of, you know, things that organizations and the enterprise will want MDM, master Data Management is part of their story. There's things like and I've never really felt that Microsoft has gone after a product for MDM. They tend to partner with those MDM folks out in the market. We saw in Build recently that the announcement around Snowflake, which is, you know, in recent times, had a lot of traction and that being partnered with as well in this data space. So when we look at Microsoft's vision, of course Power BI market leading, undisputed number one BI tool globally and, you know, shot to incredible fame through that almost weekly new functionality being added for so long and all software we see has gone that way. But tell me about the vision of Fabric. And, yeah, from a holistic perspective, what was Microsoft's vision?

Scott Sewell: Well, I think it was looking at Power BI and, like you said, the incredible growth and the acceptance in the marketplace of this tool because they saw it as a tool that it made it accessible made this really what was a fairly a little bit like dark magic that you had to set up. I mean, I built some tools on you know name the competitor beforehand and some of them it was just so. I mean it was incredible power, incredible use. But you really had to just completely embrace the terminology and mindset and you spent a lot of time, you know, twiddling dials and stuff like this. Power BI made that so that you can get started and get active and useful very quickly without having to learn a whole brand new ecosystem by itself. And it works nicely with the rest of the Microsoft suite, plays nicely with others and so it was a really easy. But then when you started looking over at the data side of things beyond the Power BI reports, the warehousing analytics, the warehousing, the Blake houses, tools like Data Factory and it just keeps you run the gamut of the real-time intelligence and all these tools became they were like always there that Power BI needed to interact with, but it was kind of this jump in requirement level or technical difficulty to jump up and step into these other tools, this democratization, if you want to call it that. Or let's bring this accessibility or this approachability that we have with Power BI, where it's just a service you turn it on and run with it. Let's bring these other tools into that same ecosystem, that same platform and make this a larger holistic data platform than just the analytics and reporting piece that we have over here in Power BI. Let's take advantage of that same theme and move out across the rest of the platform and expand it to that level. And this is why I think the Power Platform community, the ecosystem between the two, is such a natural fit.

Scott Sewell: It kind of obscures a lot of the really nerdy technical details that were necessary to set one of these things up, set up an organization.

Scott Sewell: Some of the really esoteric things that you had to know and how to plan for that kind of goes away. Back in our day, back in the old days, you remember when we went out and you had to set up SQL servers and you had to decide what disk your log files were going to be on, how are you going to partition the data side, and you know just all the stuff you had to do to set that up. Nobody knows that stuff anymore. I mean, a handful of people do that and I certainly never got great at it. I was competent, but never great at it. But now it's kind of the same thing over here on this fabric side is that you have these tools that you used to have. Depend on some real, really, really smart experts to fine tune and configure is now just part of the background, not part of your focus area. So I think that's why this has become such a resonant conversation.

Mark Smith: My colleague, andrew Walsh, has written some recent white papers and he's very, very pro the Fabric Dataverse story and I've just done a little something. That's with the Microsoft team in North America around the fallacy of free when it comes to using basic licensing as opposed to premium on the power platform site. And as I was doing it, like the excitement built in me as I once again re-explored Dataverse you know, which we've had from the XRM story and of course, he says that the Dataverse and the power platform is. Everyone thinks it's an app story, but it's actually a data story. And then when you bring data and the structure that you get with Dataverse into Fabric, I want you to talk a bit about what is that story and what is the power of that story. Preface it slightly that perhaps this is more in the mid-market enterprise play where you're dealing with potentially terabytes of data. What's that story for you? That Dataverse to Fabric story?

Scott Sewell: So the thing that I always loved about Dataverse has been that it makes the opportunity to capture and process data a part of the process, of what's going on inside of business. And so the business says, hey, I want to manage service cases, or I want to track installations, or I want to track this or that, whatever it is, then they can set up these apps and sit them on top of Dataverse and just run with it and, honestly, they're just starting to accumulate a bunch of data and that data has a lot of value in its timestamp. It becomes consistent across it, it's managed in a way that's not ad hoc. It's also queryable very easily and you start backing into some best practices with that data. That then becomes this really rich asset that's ready to be mine, and I think that's where we see a lot of the value in it.

Scott Sewell: And then this happens in one part of the organization and then another team or another department picks up and says, okay, we need to use Dataverse. We're not going to use what you guys built. We're going to use something very different and we're going to use it for another, completely different purpose. That happens, it just runs, and now you start having these Dataverse environments set up. Sometimes they're going to be joined together, they're all going to be sitting on the same environment, sometimes they're going to be separate environment, but, all in all, you're capturing data in a really strongly typed and managed and consistent and date stamped and nobody's going back and it's not an Excel file or SharePoint or something like that, where it's kind of a little bit wild wild west. It becomes a structure and pattern that you start repeating against. That becomes a really valuable source.

Scott Sewell: You know you mentioned Brad's message. There was at one point. There was a catchphrase a lot of people thought was great was data is the new oil? Competitive vendor, probably five or six years ago, had t-shirts that said data is the new bacon. I actually like that one, but it becomes incredibly valuable. The gap, though, is being able to take advantage of it, being able to look at it and process it at a level above just a transaction level, and look at it trends, forecasting, allocation, what's going on in this?

Mark Smith: So, my last question and we've gone for 30 minutes now and we haven't mentioned it, but it's time to mention the value of data when it makes up part of your AI estate, when we start bringing Copilot into the mix. Now AI needs data like a ravenous animal.

Mark Smith: Tell me, then, how you talk about Fabric, dataverse and the importance now that every customer in the market is trying to figure out. How do we leverage AI and how do we get all? You talked about Excel and the Wild Wild West and stuff. The problem in an AI world is, yes, all those resources are consumable, and that's not necessarily just a benefit. It's a double-edged sword, because there could be stuff in those resources that you do not want to be highly consumable. Right?

Mark Smith: How many files and resources inside anybody's data estate inside the organization we're not talking about on the internet, but inside, is full of PI, pii data and all of a sudden, you have a tool like AI that can understand all the patterns, bring that all together, run probabilities across them and light that up in a way that anybody could query internally. In the past, you know, in the SQL world, you had to know how, to you know, construct a query. That got you something back. Now you can talk to a piece of software and it will find. You don't have to know where it is, but it'll find that data and present it however you're asking to present it. So tell me when you think AI.

Scott Sewell: Okay, for one, yes, and I've kind of avoided talking about the AI side because it just gets talked about so commonly. But I think that you're exactly right. As AI moves, in some areas the party tricks, you know. In some cases it's like, hey, look at this cool thing. I mean that was probably a year ago. It was like, really that I mean it can be doing that it's. And now there are eight parts of AI that I use every day and I don't even think about it. It's just a part of my natural workspace and it accelerates what I do.

Scott Sewell: There are co-pilots that I don't even think about as being part of what I do, but all of those models and all those things have to consume data from somewhere. If it's ChatGPT or some you know name the model that's out there and it's pulling stuff from Wikipedia and Wall Street Journal and New York Times, that's fine. It builds this really rich model, but it doesn't know what's really going on inside your business. It doesn't understand the uniqueness of what's happening with what you're doing, or the patterns that your support cases or your sales opportunities, the patterns that they go through cases or your sales opportunities, the patterns that they go through. That's where the moving dataverse into being a source for your own internal co-pilots, your own internal models, these RAG models and a lot of things that I a lot of acronyms there but as you move those in and that becomes part of your own organization's models, are able to consume. You're getting data about real world activity in your organization. The patterns that your organization has and what it can expose about your organization is different from the organization next door, and the better you have a handle on being able to bring that data forward and make it available to these co-pilots for ingestion, the faster those tools can return value to you.

Scott Sewell: Yes, one of these RAG tools or one of the tools can start looking at all your data and consume it all. It has to have a lot before it starts building out strong patterns. If you're just throwing a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, it doesn't know which one's important or what the connections between those records are. If you're pointing it to Dataverse, it's a very structured set of data. It's got a lot of text in it, a lot of background, a lot of email history. It's there inside of it. You're almost feeding it like rocket fuel because it can take that data and consume it very quickly and turn it into something valuable. It's going to be able to find the rest of the data in your organization and it's going to find value there, but it's not as fast as it's when you bring it through Dataverse. You're teeing it up and saying here it is, go for it, get started on this.

Scott Sewell: I think there's a real value in the Dataverse side. Fabric, of course, is doing the same thing as you bring data together inside of Fabric. One of the real strengths of the Fabric Dataverse conversation is that you're bringing Dataverse data into Fabric and you can bring data from other parts of your organization into the same lake houses, the same models, and say, these parts of the organization. I want to tie this together with my work order history and I want to produce an intelligent model that helps me identify patterns in my work order history as well as predict what I need to have going into inventory, et cetera. I think it's just like I said it's like rocket fuel bringing that data in through Dataverse.

Scott Sewell: I believe very strongly that Dataverse is going to be a strong player. It's probably going to be a little bit underappreciated in terms of the value that it brings because it's so easy. Sometimes, when something's easy, nobody appreciates it, but I think it's maybe a little bit underappreciated in terms of how much value that data is and how quickly it brings it together with that. That said, I want to plug for the fall. Will you be at the Power Platform Conference?

Mark Smith: in Vegas.

Scott Sewell: Absolutely Great. I'll see you there. We have some announcements in this conversation that will be happening Power Platform Conference. Completely vague, I know, but this is an area where Microsoft is doubling down because we've seen the impact that it can have and the cool thing is it's moving it out of these. You know, you have just these university nerds out here that are just brilliant folks that can work on these things and it's now moving it out to where just brilliant folks that can work on these things and it's now moving it out to where the rest of us can work on it and the rest of us can take advantage of tools that have been built and it makes it incredibly simple. The hockey stick is just crazy right now in terms of how fast value is coming into everyday people like you and me.

Mark Smith: I love it. Listen, if you're attending the Vegas conference and you need a discount code, hit me up, I can supply that. Otherwise, Scott, I'll see you there, looking forward to it. That'll be two years in a row. We've caught up. I think so In real life. Thanks, mate, cheers. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite.

Scott Sewell Profile Photo

Scott Sewell

Scott Sewell is passionate about helping users gain insights and value from their Dataverse data with the incredible Microsoft Fabric suite of data tools. In his role as a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, he leverages his expertise in Fabric, Power BI, and Dynamics 365 to deliver solutions that enable data-driven decision-making and digital transformation for customers across various industries and domains.

Previously, as a Dynamics 365 Global Black Belt and a Senior Solutions Architect, he worked with the Microsoft Power Platform to evangelize and implement BI and AI solutions that unlocked the potential of CRM and ERP data. He led a team of architects, data scientists, and analytics consultants who tackled complex business problems with the Microsoft BI stack. He also contributed to two books on CRM best practices and strategies, sharing his knowledge and experience with the CRM community.